I'm Feeling the Blues Right Now: Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta

I’m Feeling the Blues

RIGHT NOW

AMERICAN MADE MUSIC SERIES

Advisory Board

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Susan C. Cook

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

David Sanjek

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

I’m Feeling the Blues

RIGHT NOW

Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta

STEPHEN A. KING

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Parts of this book were originally published in:

Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums: Constructive Authenticity and the Primitive Blues Subject. Southern Communication Journal 71 (2006): 235–50. Published by Taylor and Francis.

Race and Blues Tourism: A Comparison of Two Lodging Alternatives in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 36 (2005): 26–42.

Blues Tourism in the Mississippi Delta: The Functions of Blues Festivals. Popular Music and Society 27 (2004): 455–75. Published by Taylor and Francis.

Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2011

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

King, Stephen A., 1964–

I’m feeling the blues right now : blues tourism and the Mississippi

Delta / Stephen A. King.

    p. cm. — (American made music series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Discography.

ISBN 978-1-61703-010-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-61703-011-6 (ebook) 1. Blues (Music)—Social aspects. 2. Blues (Music)—Mississippi—Delta (Region)—History and criticism. 3. Music and tourism—Mississippi—Delta (Region)—

History. I. Title.

ML3918.B57K56 2011

306.4’84243097624—dc22                2010052088

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

TO P, D, & L

[The blues is] the mother of our music and you got to take care of your mother.

—THELONIOUS MONK JR., speaking at the dedication of a Mississippi Blues Trail marker at Dockery Farms

The average blues player you see around here is probably about like me. He is really struggling, man. You got to really, really struggle to pay your bills. Boy, you’re just one level above welfare.

—MISSISSIPPI SLIM, blues musician

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The History of the Mississippi Delta Blues

2. The History of Blues Tourism in the Mississippi Delta

3. Blues Myths and the Rhetorical Imagination of Place

4. Blues Festivals, Race, and the Construction of Authenticity

5. A Blues Countermemory

The History of Mississippi, the Story of the Delta

6. Public Memory, Historical Amnesia, and the Shack Up Inn

7. Assessing Tourism Goals

Money, Image, and Reconciliation

Notes

Bibliography

Selective Discography

Index

PREFACE

The modern blues world is a strange and marvelous place, rippling with contradictions and sorely in need of honest critique.

—ADAM GUSSOW, Journeyman’s Road

For more than three decades, blues tourists have traveled to Mississippi in search of authenticity in the land where the blues began. In an effort to attract even more tourists to the state, Mississippi has proclaimed itself the birthplace of the blues, an assertion that rests largely on the fact that many of the genre’s greatest and most influential blues artists were born in Mississippi (particularly in the state’s Delta region) during the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth. Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Elmore James—the list is long and authoritative. Alienated in part by what they consider to be the commercialization and superficiality of popular music and the blues itself, blues tourists travel to Mississippi to drink beer at authentic juke joints like Poor Monkey’s, attend blues festivals to listen to the primitive sounds of blues icons like David Honeyboy Edwards (who played with Robert Johnson) and James T-Model Ford, and photograph the gravesites of Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and other blues alumni. This ritualistic act embodies blues tourism’s cult of death, a preoccupation with the passing of a whole generation of blues musicians and the belief that the blues itself is in the latter stages of some incurable terminal illness.¹

Driving down U.S. Highway 61, touted as the Blues Highway, tourists are often amazed by the Delta’s otherworldly qualities. Although the largely rural and underprivileged region has changed dramatically since 1941, when Muddy Waters first played his acoustic guitar for folklorist Alan Lomax, who was visiting Mississippi to record African American folksongs in Coahoma County for the Library of Congress, tourists marvel at the seeming simplicity and purity of a land that time forgot.² In the book In Search of the Blues, blues historian Marybeth Hamilton beautifully describes the spellbinding and intoxicating powers of the Delta:

On Old Highway 61 in Mississippi, between Lula and Robinsonville in the heart of the Delta, stands the remains of a wooden railroad bridge partially submerged in a murky swamp. The air enveloping the bridge is sticky and fetid, thick with the smell of decayed vegetation, and the dark, stagnant water stretches far into the distance, flooding the banks, engulfing the trees. To look at the scene is to peer at an eerie, apparently timeless landscape, primordial and untouched by history, the world Noah might have glimpsed after the flood. … I found myself wholly caught up in the pilgrimage whose mythology I had set out to debunk.

Yet, after returning to England, Hamilton’s romantic and nostalgic view of the Delta was replaced by a more realistic assessment of the images that she captured with her camera. Modernity and machines painfully intruded into the dreamlike fantasy of a primitive blues Eden:

It took several months for the spell to be broken. Over time, once I’d returned to a frenetically urban, postindustrial London, my photograph of the railway bridge on Old Highway 61 began to tell a new tale. Looking at the swamp’s stagnant water, I came to recognize that the primeval scene was in fact the product of a very modern process, which had absorbed the efforts of thousands of black workers in the late nineteenth century, of draining and clearing the wetlands to open the Delta for cotton crops. … Every landscape is a work of the mind, shaped by the memories and obsessions of its observers. What I glimpsed was a Delta that memory had forgotten, full of bustle and noise and machines.³

I admit I once entertained romantic fantasies about the Mississippi Delta. In 1986, I discovered Robert Johnson when I was a junior at Boise State University. Johnson’s superlative slide guitar, coupled with his anguished, tormented cries of pain and confessions of supernatural sin, were mesmerizing and unforgettable. Through Johnson’s songs, I imagined the Delta as an evocative, haunting, dangerous place where the ghosts of Johnson and other blues legends played in rowdy juke joints or on mysterious rural country roads. Years later, when I accepted a tenure-track position at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, my fantasy was put to the test. I was instantly struck by the searing, unforgiving heat (and millions of mosquitoes), the bleak, monotonous landscape, the rampant rural poverty, the wide disparity between rich and poor, and the insidious racism and discrimination that continue to consume the lives of some of the Delta’s inhabitants. One local white confessed to me that he often dreamed of flying over Niggertown with cans of gasoline and a match with plans to burn the east side of Cleveland to the ground. The racial attitude of some whites in Mississippi makes it clear that Mississippi is still, in a very real sense, a blues state.

In early 2001, after completing the final proofs for my book Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control, I started to seriously contemplate my options for my next scholarly project. My book on reggae traced how the music and the Rastafarian movement (a social movement responsible for the direction and development of roots reggae during the 1970s) were transformed from a perceived enemy of the state—characterized by the Jamaican government and the country’s national newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, as a violent group of dreadlock-wearing, pot-smoking revolutionary extremists—to tourism partner. In the book, I argued that with the international popularity of reggae music (e.g., Bob Marley and the Wailers) and the growing respect for the Rastafarian movement both in Jamaica and beyond, the Jamaican government and its surrogates successfully co-opted the movement and the music, an effective strategy of social control that also enticed tourists to visit the island nation.

During this transitional period, I contemplated the intriguing parallels between reggae music in Jamaica and blues music in Mississippi: both musical forms are, in part, responses to oppression within the black diaspora; both are examples of protest music (although reggae music is certainly a more overt form of protest); both emerged from individuals and groups that occupied the lowest stratum of society (poor, black, dispossessed, exploited, powerless); both have a relatively large white consumer base and have carved out a devoted international audience; both have been used for the purposes of cultural or heritage tourism. Then the question struck me: Is (white) Mississippi in the process of co-opting the blues just as the Jamaican authorities had done with reggae some twenty years ago?

The question of whether whites in Mississippi are in the process of, or have already accomplished the goal of, co-opting the blues is a contentious one. An equally controversial debate involves the much broader issue of white appropriation and control of blues music.⁴ Some of the more vocal critics have scorned white blues musicians for playing and profiting from the blues. In Blues People: Negro Music in White America, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) laughingly characterized the idea of a white blues artist as an even more violent contradiction of terms than the idea of a middle class blues singer.⁵ In a 1990 editorial in Guitar Player magazine, guest columnist Lawrence Hoffman depicted white blues musicians as nothing more than expressive copyist[s] who pretend to play the blues. Blaming record companies, radio stations, blues societies, and a misinformed public for perpetuating a system that benefits white blues musicians at the expense of the original black blues masters, Hoffman lamented the fate of true living bluesmen trying desperately to compete with the white Xerox machines who have usurped the market.⁶ The condemnation of the white blues tradition also parallels the entertaining, but annoying, debate over whether whites can sing, or even play, the blues.⁷

Opposing voices contend that white involvement in the blues can be traced back nearly to the creation of the genre itself. Although he argues that the blues was, in its origins, wholly African American, blues scholar Paul Oliver argues that the blues form combines both African (field hollers, call and response) and European influences (harmonic structures).⁸ Both white and black singers recorded blues music during its early years, and there was considerable musical overlap and influence among white country blues artists and their African American counterparts.⁹ It is also true that whites, for at least the last forty years, have dominated the blues world as both promoters and consumers of the musical form. In turn, some have claimed that without the blues’ enthusiastic and appreciative white audience, the music would long ago have perished.¹⁰ In a 2008 interview, Mississippi blues artist Terry Harmonica Bean said that if "it weren’t for the white people, though, it [the blues] woulda done died out. That’s who keeping it going. I hate to say it, but it’s true. You know, because the black peoples is not into the blues, they into rhythm and blues."¹¹

As I considered various arguments concerning white co-optation of the blues in Mississippi, I became less and less confident in my original assumption that white Mississippians are in the process of actively defrauding the state’s black population of its blues heritage. And while most blues promoters—at both state and local levels—are white, the level and degree of any co-optation process are still undetermined. It is even more unclear if whites are reaping whatever financial benefits are associated with blues tourism. Although I discuss this subject in the latter portion of the final chapter, I am generally less interested in questions of co-optation and more intrigued with rhetorical representations of the blues, which is the primary focus of this book. What rhetorical strategies are blues promoters and organizers in Mississippi (from the local to the state level) employing to attract the attention of potential tourists to travel to the Delta? How are these promotional materials portraying the Delta’s blues culture and its musicians? How do cultural producers mediate between promoting Mississippi’s blues culture and history and acknowledging (or forgetting) the state’s historical record of racial injustice?

Having spent over fifteen years living and working in the Delta, I have obtained, in some measure, the insider-outsider perspective, a role that allows me the necessary distance to be a skeptical critic while writing from a position of some authority about the Delta’s troublesome and wonderful culture through firsthand experience, observation, and research. It is my hope that this book is an honest and fair critique of aspects of Mississippi’s blues tourism industry.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"No man is an island, no man stands alone," the Mighty Diamonds sang, and indeed, no author stands alone. As I search my own private memories, hoping not to make the mistake of omission, I remember how my former professors (Michael Hogan, Richard Jensen, Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, Jan Schuetz, Ben Parker, and others) demanded excellence and encouraged me to sharpen my scholarly tools, ultimately preparing me to embark on my first major postdissertation project. I would be remiss if I did not express my love to my parents, who have always steadfastly supported my academic pursuits and interests.

I would like to thank the library staff at three local libraries, the Carnegie Public Library (Clarksdale), the William Alexander Percy Memorial Library (Greenville), and the Greenwood-Leflore Public Library (Greenwood). I also relied on Delta State University’s Interlibrary Loan Department. Diane Coleman, assistant librarian II, was instrumental in securing sources not available on campus. David Salinero, a reference librarian at DSU, proved to be very skillful in locating a number of government documents used for this study. I also found rare historical documents at Delta State University’s Archives Department, including slave contracts dating back to the early nineteenth century. In addition, I was fortunate to be in close proximity to the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The university’s Department of Archives and Special Collections (which contains the awe-inspiring Blues Archives) is a gold mine for scholars interested in studying southern culture, civil rights, and popular culture, especially blues music, among other areas of interest. When I started conducting preliminary research on this project, blues scholar Edward Komara was the curator of the Blues Archives. Later I worked with Greg Johnson, associate professor and the Blues Archives’ current curator. Greg was very supportive of my research and assisted me in locating key sources for this project. I would also like to thank Jimmy Giles of Clarksdale, the organizers for the King Biscuit Blues Festival (now called the Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival), KFFA radio, and Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE).

I am very fortunate to be a member of the Division of Languages and Literature at Delta State University. My many friendships there have helped to sustain my scholarship over the years, and I am lucky to have worked for two wonderful department chairs, Dorothy Shawhan (1995–2006) and Bill Hays (2006–present). Thank you for your friendship and support. Special thanks to my colleague Susan Allen Ford for fielding citation and reference questions. The university also supported my research, providing me funding to attend a variety of academic conferences both in the United States and abroad. Beyond university support, I financed the rest of the costs associated with the project.

I would like to thank David Evans, professor of music in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis, for his detailed comments and helpful suggestions that started the difficult but necessary revision process. I would like to thank Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, for his careful reading of the manuscript and his supportive and constructive comments that greatly improved the manuscript. A word of appreciation is also extended to a third reader, who provided helpful feedback on how to strengthen the study.

I am highly indebted to Craig Gill, assistant director and editor in chief at the University Press of Mississippi. Craig and I have known each other since 1999, when we first talked about transforming my dissertation on reggae music into a book. While I was revising this book, he was always reasonable, cheerful, supportive, and encouraging. Although I’m sure some author-editor relationships are marked by contentiousness and distrust, working with Craig has been an absolute pleasure. On that note, I would like to thank all staff members from the University Press of Mississippi, from editorial (e.g., Anne Stascavage) to marketing (e.g., Steve Yates) to design and production (e.g., John Langston), for their hard work that made it possible for this manuscript to be transformed into a book.

While writing this book, I received, to my great surprise, unsolicited correspondence from students, both undergraduate and graduate, from Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, and California, who were working on similar projects. I am encouraged by this growing interest by younger scholars in an area of blues scholarship that is still relatively new and unexplored. Perhaps this book will serve as some sort of foundation for future work in blues tourism.

Another person who has devoted considerable time to this project is P. Renée Foster. When I met Renée in January 1996, I had recently been hired as an instructor at DSU and was still struggling to complete a final draft of my dissertation. After I completed the dissertation, she helped me transform it into a book. For this blues project, I relied on her as an internal editor: she read countless drafts, correcting errors, crossing out sentences and paragraphs, writing suggestions in the margins, with the express goal, of course, of pushing me to create a quality manuscript. Her fingerprints are literally on every page of the book. She often accompanied me as I conducted field research, visited libraries, and attended blues festivals and other tourism events. She eased the burden associated with writing this book, and my love for her is constant and boundless. Lajara, our five-year-old gray cat, who has a remarkable devotion to me, sat in a chair next to the computer desk and waited patiently for me to turn my attention away from the computer screen and pet her. Dready, Lajara’s feline companion, with his never-ending demand for food, made sure I got up to feed him. By giving me time to reflect between long writing stretches, the cats helped me get the job done.

A final word: part of the book title is borrowed from a quotation from a 2008 Living Blues interview with longtime Clarksdale blues musicians Wesley Jefferson and Terry Williams. I liked Jefferson’s phrase I’m feeling the blues right now because of its ambiguity and irony. I never had the chance to interview him. He died on July 22, 2009, from complications associated with lung cancer. But I did have the chance to interview a number of individuals—musicians, local blues promoters, festival organizers, Mississippi Blues Commission members, chamber of commerce officials, blues scholars, and others—and their collective voices represent joy and anger, idealism and realism, and contradiction and conflict, qualities that signify Mississippi’s blues tourism industry. Their names are listed in the bibliography, and I thank each one for sharing his or her thoughts about Mississippi’s blues tourism industry.

I’m Feeling the Blues

RIGHT NOW

INTRODUCTION

But just how do you attract visitors to a region famous for

poverty and a violent history of racism?

  —SHELIA HARDWELL BYRD, Deltans Find Hope in Blues

Since the 1960s, the blues has experienced numerous cultural revivals, attracting the attention of record companies, corporate sponsors, multinational companies, and a legion of new fans. Many predicted that the latest major blues revival in 2003, dubbed the Year of the Blues, would be a major success because, according to Rolling Stone magazine, the blues is more important and more necessary now than it has ever been.¹ The U.S. Senate designated 2003 the Year of the Blues because the blues is the most celebrated form of American roots music and blues musicians are recognized and revered worldwide as unique and important ambassadors of the United States and its music.² The Year of the Blues also served as a hundredth anniversary of sorts, commemorating blues musician and composer W. C. Handy’s (known as the Father of the Blues) initial encounter with the blues while waiting for a train at a railroad station in the small Mississippi Delta town of Tutwiler.³ Considerable celebratory fanfare accompanied the Year of the Blues, including the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Blues: A Musical Journey, a seven-part series that aired on PBS.

Meanwhile, this most recent blues revival has also stoked the vivid imaginations of tourists seeking to consume alternative forms of popular culture, an event that parallels an increasing fascination and appetite for American roots music.⁴ By going to the root of popular forms of music, argues sociologist Robert Owen Gardner, audiences believe they can escape the commodifying and co-optive forces of mass culture.⁵ Underneath the prefabrication and formulaic sameness of so much of what we watch and listen to, enthuses music critic Anthony DeCurtis, the blues courses like a vital stream that can be tapped into for a life-affirming jolt of raw energy.⁶ Searching for an authentic and pure blues experience, many blues tourists make the journey to the Mississippi Delta, often touted as the birthplace of the blues. Located in northwestern Mississippi, the Delta was birthplace and home to some of the genre’s greatest musicians, from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters to B. B. King.

As a subset of a larger international tourism industry, blues tourism encompasses a complex series of often interrelated and multidimensional public- and private-sector organizations, from blues museums to chambers of commerce to local entrepreneurs, which attempt to draw tourists to specific geographic areas (e.g., Chicago, Memphis, the Mississippi Delta) to experience the culture or heritage of the blues. As such, blues tourism has been framed as an example of cultural tourism.⁷ Anne K. Soper, a tourism scholar, argues that cultural tourism includes both tangible and intangible elements, from historic homes to places of worship, folk songs to myths.⁸ In turn, cultural tourism involves marketing cultural sites, events, attractions, and/or experiences.⁹ For the blues tourist, cultural artifacts may include historical markers and signs, graves, plantations, hotels, cafés, recording studios, lounges, juke joints, blues clubs, music festivals, songs, books, DVDs, and records.¹⁰

A variety of entities from government agencies to local entrepreneurs are actively involved in marketing and promoting Mississippi’s blues heritage and culture to potential tourists. Representing official culture, the organizations responsible for marketing the Delta blues are both local (chambers of commerce) and regional (Mississippi Delta Tourism Association), as well as statewide governmental entities (Mississippi Development Authority/Tourism Division). Typically, many promotional efforts by chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus target consumers who live more than one hundred miles away from a particular Delta community, especially in border states such as Arkansas and Tennessee.¹¹ Through a variety of promotional tools and interactive Web sites, the Mississippi Development Authority/Tourism Division’s (MDA) plan also involves targeting states that border Mississippi, with a focus on appealing to a younger demographic, ages twenty-five to thirty-four, as well as baby boomers. The state’s plan also includes an instate campaign that will give Mississippians a new reason to visit their own state.¹² In his review of heritage sites in the Mississippi Delta, sociologist Alan Barton argued that the state should work more vigorously to target its local population. In a survey he conducted of Delta residents, only 32 percent of respondents had attended at least one blues festival or visited a blues club in 2004. The percentage for repeat visitors was considerably lower, 3.4 percent.¹³

GOALS OF BLUES TOURISM

Mississippi’s blues tourism industry serves at least three separate but interrelated goals. The first and perhaps most obvious is economic. Blues tourism has become, in part, a necessary response to a seemingly never-ending economic crisis in one of the country’s most impoverished states. Before the economic collapse and recession of 2008, Mississippi had the unfortunate reputation of leading the nation in the percentage of individuals unemployed. For example, in December 2007, Mississippi’s unemployment rate, 6.4 percent, topped the national average of 4.8 percent.¹⁴ In 2008 the state had the lowest personal income per capita and median household income of any state in the nation. In that same year, Mississippi had the nation’s highest percentage of individuals living under the poverty line.¹⁵ In 2007 Mississippi led the nation in the largest percentage of children and families living in poverty.¹⁶ In the area of education, Mississippi ranked dead last (with the exception of the District of Columbia) in 2008 in a variety of categories, including ACT composite scores.¹⁷ It is no wonder that the 2008 State Rankings guide rated Mississippi the nation’s most unlivable state.¹⁸

Arguably, the epicenter of the state’s miseries can be found in its Delta region. In July 2010 only one county (Desoto, 8.7 percent) out of nineteen core and partial Delta counties had an unemployment rate below 11.0 percent (compared to the U.S. average of 9.7 percent) with some counties as high as 22.7 percent.¹⁹ Many Delta counties have been classified as distressed due, in part, to high poverty rates, low average household income, and lackluster achievement in education.²⁰ Indeed, recurring high rates of unemployment and poverty and a declining tax base have for all practical purposes cemented Mississippi’s Delta region as one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest states in the union. In an analysis of the lower Mississippi River Delta, one observer offered a sobering account of the Delta’s challenges: Persistent poverty and a lack of resources make it difficult to create positive change in the region.²¹

However, the Delta is certainly not unique in its desire to exploit tourism as a new revenue producer. Indeed, as geographers Stephen Frenkel and Judy Walton have observed: The post–World War II era has witnessed the decline of a number of rural, resource-based economies and an increasing turn to tourism as an alternative economy.²² Many of these rural communities have turned to niche tourism, a relatively new development that capitalizes on the increasing efforts of whole communities to accentuate their cultural heritage, partly in bids to increase their tourism potential.²³ During the 1960s, for example, the town of Leavenworth, Washington, decided to transform itself into a Bavarian theme town.²⁴ Other examples include Cave Creek, Arizona, which advertises itself as a Wild West frontier town, and Canterbury, New Hampshire, a small town of less than two thousand that draws tourists to the remnants of a once thriving Shaker Village. In a 2008 interview, Wanda Clark, the project coordinator for the Mississippi Blues Trail, stated that one of the missions associated with blues tourism is to encourage tourists to spend money in smaller Delta communities, such as the tiny town of Shaw, Mississippi, that have experienced years of economic stagnation and even depression because of depopulation (particularly white flight and black out-migration) and the loss of vital manufacturing and agricultural industries and jobs.²⁵

While not a panacea for the state’s economic woes, tourism is perceived as an increasingly important part of Mississippi’s overall economy. In 2010 the MDA’s Fiscal Year 2009 Economic Contribution of Travel and Tourism in Mississippi claimed that tourism is a driving force in the state’s economic development and a key part of Mississippi’s economic development engine. Still, the industry makes up a relatively small portion of the state’s overall economic activity. Tourism accounted for just 4 percent of the gross state product (GSP) in 2009, ranking sixth (out of thirteen sectors) in the state in terms of direct employment (78,240) behind government, wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, education and health services, and professional and business services.²⁶

Although Mississippi’s state government does not maintain records of revenue generated from blues tourism, many tourism officials, local politicians, blues organizers, and promoters recognize the potential economic impact associated with blues tourism. Claiming that Mississippi’s local government entities would be crazy not to explore the economic potential of an art form that’s rooted firmly in the Delta soil, a Clarksdale Press Register reporter argued that, with more financial support from the state, blues-related tourism could grow exponentially, boosting the economy of a region hit hard in recent years by the decline of rural America’s manufacturing economy.²⁷ Local and regional headlines, such as There are $ in Blues, Tourism, Will the Blues Bring Bucks?, and Music Heritage May Be Next Cash Crop, clearly suggest that blues tourism is becoming widely recognized as a potential source of revenue.²⁸ Mississippi governor Haley Barbour acknowledged that while these musicians grew up in great deprivation and poverty, the state has realized what a powerful economic development tool this music can be.²⁹ In June 2010, Barbour even told an audience of 120 prominent Mississippi officials and business leaders that the Delta’s economic future rests in tourism, including promoting the state’s blues heritage.³⁰ Writing in the March–June 2004 issue of Living Blues magazine, a former editor of the publication, Jim O’Neal, reflected on the burgeoning blues tourism industry in Mississippi:

Whatever ironies may lie in the exaltation of a music born to poverty to boost the economy of the poorest state in the union, the fact is that Mississippi has finally realized that there is something to this business of Japanese and Norwegians and Californians showing up in search of blues sites and blues artists, buying bouquets at the local florist shop to place on some forgotten grave, or wandering around across the tracks with guitars on their backs or cameras in their hands.³¹

As reports from local chambers of commerce and convention and visitors bureaus indicate, more and more potential visitors are seeking information about the Delta’s rich blues heritage. In a 2007 interview, Kappi Allen, tourism manager of the Coahoma County Tourism Commission, noted that the number of inquiries from blues tourists seems to increase every year. Her office typically receives at least thirty telephone calls a day (and numerous e-mail messages) from potential tourists, some from Europe and Asia.³² Carmen Walsh, executive director of the Greenville–Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, confirms increasing interest by tourists about the region’s blues culture.³³

To meet the rising demands of tourists who seek out the birthplace of the blues, a number of travel guides, including Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues (2008), Memphis and the Delta Blues Trail (2009), Delta Blues Map Kit (2004), and Lonely Planet Road Trip: Blues and BBQ (2005), have been published.³⁴ In 2004, with financial underwriting from the Mississippi Development Authority, Living Blues magazine devoted an entire issue to constructing a traveler’s guide of sorts in an effort to encourage visitors to come to Mississippi, and to point them in the right direction once here.³⁵ In addition, since the mid-1990s, the number of blues festivals in the region has expanded from a handful to approximately fifty, while new blues museums have been created (or are in various stages of development) to showcase Mississippi’s blues history. In 2007 the Tourism Division of the Mississippi Development Authority launched Tune In Mississippi, a twenty-four-hour Internet radio station featuring blues music.³⁶

Meanwhile a variety of tour companies, including Great Britain’s Roots of Rhythm tour and Nashville’s Sweet Magnolia Tours, have tapped into a growing market that demands packaged tours. For example, the Delta Music Experience (DME) markets variations of a Real Deal tour, a two-week round-trip adventure that originates in New Orleans. Traveling by train and bus, tourists spend a week in the Mississippi Delta and are introduced to an assortment of highly touted blues sites, from Poor Monkey’s juke joint in Merigold to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. Asserting that tourists will be immersed in the region’s music and culture, Amanda Gresham, the company’s founder, proclaims that the soul of the blues lives in the delta.³⁷ In Greenwood, Mississippi, local entrepreneur and Baptist deacon Sylvester Hoover has created the Delta Blues Legend Tour, a three-hour adventure that includes Robert Johnson’s three burial sites. For blues fans who have neither the time nor the financial wherewithal to physically travel to the Delta, there are numerous virtual tours on Mississippi Delta blues sites, including the ghoulish Dead Blues Guys, a Web site devoted to memorializing over eighty blues musicians (among them Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Hound Dog Taylor, and Stevie Ray Vaughan) through photos of graves, headstones, and markers.³⁸

Sensing the lucrative possibilities, local entrepreneurs and small business owners are even getting into the act. For example, Gary Hilton and Tom Ramsey (who is no longer with the company) officially formed a cigar company in 2007, Avalon Cigars, named after the hometown of the well-known musician Mississippi John Hurt. Cigars are named after blues artists, both living and deceased.³⁹ Mag-Pie Gift and Art Shop in Clarksdale sells the Crossroads Blues Tervis Tumblers, drinking glasses and mugs with the design of the crossroads (U.S. Highways 61 and 49) emblazoned on the side of the glass. Another local business in Clarksdale sells tins of assorted candy called Delta Blues and Gold. The cover of the container features a drawing of a blue guitar and golden cotton. Blueswood Arts, in Batesville, Mississippi, has developed its own unique brand of blues furniture with names such as Blind Willie’s Juke Joint, a liquor cabinet, and A Devil’s Shelf, where one can display guitar strings and black cat bones, among other items. One inventive soul is even selling Mississippi Delta Graveyard Dirt on the Internet for twenty dollars per bottle.⁴⁰

Even with the real potential to draw audiences to the region from the four corners of the globe, the state’s blues tourism industry is still in its infancy, making it difficult to guarantee its economic sustainability. As Alan Barton reminds us, unless a large segment of the local population is willing to accept and embrace the influx of new tourists to the area, it is unlikely that the region will have long-term success in the tourism business.⁴¹ However, in a 2005 survey of residents of eleven counties in the Mississippi Delta region, Barton found strong local support for blues tourism: 71.6 percent of respondents supported the idea of tourists visiting a blues club or blues festival, and 78.3 percent supported tourists visiting a blues museum or other blues-related sites. Reflecting the trend of white interest in the blues, white respondents demonstrated a slightly higher interest than their African American counterparts in blues tourism. For example, while 76.9 percent of white participants responded favorably to tourists visiting blues clubs or festivals, only 68.6 percent of blacks favored such an activity. Barton speculates this racial difference may be due to a number of factors, including a perception among the African American respondents that white business people profit from festivals that feature African American musicians, as well as the belief that the blues is a negative influence on the African American community.⁴²

A second goal of blues tourism is related to efforts to change public perceptions about the state’s dreadful historical record of racial oppression and economic exploitation. Portrayed as uneducated, violent racists, Mississippians have fought back against these negative stereotypes. One public relations campaign, Mississippi, Believe It!, actually exploits these stereotypes to showcase the state’s strengths. Rick Looser, the COO of Cirlot Agency, a Mississippi-based communications firm, started the promotional campaign after a twelve-year-old Connecticut boy asked him if he hated black people and if he saw the KKK on the streets every day. Since 2006 the campaign has included seventeen public service announcements, and the ads themselves poke fun, for example, at the perception that Mississippians are largely uneducated and illiterate (Yes, we can read. A few of us can even write) while showcasing the state’s literary pantheon (e.g., Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright). Two ads focus on the state’s music heritage. One includes the photos of eighteen famous musicians, Jimmy Buffett, Faith Hill, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, among others, with the headline Y’all May Think We Talk Funny, but the World Takes Our Music Seriously. The organization hopes this strategy will help improve the state’s image as well as provide local Mississippians with a form of intellectual ammunition to defend the state any time its image is in question.⁴³

Beyond this unique public relations campaign, the state hopes that blues tourism will change the public’s negative perceptions of Mississippi. State senator David Jordan believes that blues tourism will help repair the state’s image as well as provide a financial benefit.⁴⁴ Two of the state’s most famous citizens, B. B. King and the actor Morgan Freeman (both of whom left Mississippi during the state’s Jim Crow era), are now two of the state’s biggest supporters. Once ashamed of his native state, B. B. King now confidently claims that Mississippi has changed so much, more than any other state in the union.⁴⁵ To encourage skeptics to visit the state, Morgan Freeman, a co-owner of one of Clarksdale’s celebrated blues clubs, proselytizes for Mississippi’s unique charm:

If you haven’t been to Mississippi, you’ve missed one of the joys of life. We’re not really what you think we are. We’re not what we’ve been painted to be. This place is like nowhere else in the entire world. We’ve been cultured in fire. We are the strongest steel. We’ve come through the hottest fire. It’s a